Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Exodus 24:12 + 15-18 AND Matthew 17:1-9

It is Transfiguration Sunday – a high holy day in the Christian tradition, though you wouldn’t know it. There are no Transfiguration Sunday dresses or ties, no special Transfiguration bonnet, and no one, I suspect, is having the family over after this for Transfiguration ham. Or maybe you are – no judgment. We have poinsettias at Advent and Lillies at Easter, but what flowers do you choose for the bright radiance of this Sunday? What best symbolizes the blinding light of this mountaintop experience for the disciples? Maybe we just set this decoration on fire?

In the flow of the gospels, this story stands next to Jesus’ birth, his baptism in the Jordan, and his resurrection as the moments we are told, in no uncertain terms, who he is and, quite specifically, that we should listen to him. It may not be a parable, or a miracle, there’s no feeding of thousands or healing of a child, those are things we can grasp. Yet, it’s clear that for the gospel writers it is one of the markers of his importance as messiah-figure, made gloriously clear in this remarkable and mysterious encounter on a mountaintop, the seminal place in Bible-speak, for an encounter with God. But it’s just a weird story full of strange images and improbable experiences.

However, we really must begin the mountaintop story before they go up on the mountain, for the events in the previous chapter reveal a very odd scenario that we could help us see the transfiguration in a new light, pardon the pun. It is chapter 16 in Matthew’s gospel that finds the disciples gathered around Jesus and he asks them – who do you say that I am? And when Peter answers, “the messiah”, Jesus tells him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah…And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Then he warns them not to tell anyone else about this whole messiah business, which seems strange since he’s just praised Peter and given him the “keys to the kingdom”, as it were, for his announcement of something that he now wants to keep silent.

Then, Matthew says, Jesus begins to show his disciples that he, “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And Peter – you remember Peter, the whole “rock on which I will build my church” guy – Peterpulls Jesus aside and rebukes him for this news, saying, “nope – can’t happen to you, Lord.” And Jesus jerks back, hand up and says, “Get behind me, Satan!” And in about two sentences, Peter goes from being the foundation of the church to being the antichrist.

My, how things change.

It is into this context that we hear that just six days later Jesus takes his three most trusted disciples up onto the mountain, including Peter, who is now out of the dog house apparently. And they experience this amazing, bizarre, even downright freaky thing. Supernatural, glowing light in the middle of the night…famous people like Moses and Elijah come back from the dead like Yoda appearing as a “force ghost” alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi…a voice speaking from inside a cloud, standing the hairs on the back of the neck straight up. It all makes, at bare minimum, for a pretty weird Bible story, supernatural and ghostly. Oh, we can recount it here, quoting the Bible, but don’t go saying that this happened to you on the top of Turkey Mountain, because you won’t get amazed interest from this congregation, you’ll likely get intervention. Things like that are best left to another kind of Christian, not us rational, intellectual types who know the difference between supernatural and real. We’re more likely to explain it away – much more probable that it was just a meteorological phenomenon, or maybe last night’s Thai food.

We rush to explain, to rationalize this story. But, like many in our Bible, it resists that. God comes to people in a cloud, obscured from clear vision often in our scripture. The bit from Exodus that we just heard, where Moses is also taking a trip up a mountain, and God comes to him in a cloud…everything is socked in for 6 days. In 1 Kings, Solomon dedicates the temple in Jerusalem and it is filled with a great cloud, so thick that the priests couldn’t see what they were doing, as if God’s presence didn’t require the priests’ ritual mechanics. Ezekiel has his visions of God’s presence surrounded by clouds with brightness and fire surrounding them. God digs the clouds. And if you have ever been on a mountaintop before, camping, and you wake up at a high enough elevation, stepping out of your tent into an actual cloud…not fog, but a cloud…you know what a powerful moment it is. It does feel “otherworldly,” like something else has arrived in camp, while you’re trying to get the fire going.

Again and again, our stories tell us that this is what God’s presence looks like – an indistinct, formless thing that obscures rather than revealing, light that blinds instead of illuminates, and an encounter with the holy that is upsetting, even scary, before it’s helpful, challenging before it’s transformative. We seem to think in so many ways that we have to know before we do, that we have to completely understand in order to move forward. Dr. King once wrote, “faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” This from a man who was entrenched most of his adult life in a terrifying and confounding struggle for something that had never been in our country, literally making up strategies as they went along…actively trying to set aside their fear in favor of purpose.

That’s why I think this experience in the cloud can only come after the disciples have experienced the things they have on the ground – the Sermon on the Mount, the healings, the feeding of the five thousand, the embrace and the denial. Living the way of Jesus is very difficult, and I’m not sure we understand our way there. At best we experience Jesus’ upside-down teachings. I’d hazard a guess that most of us here can accept the rationality of “love your neighbor,” but living it is a challenge. We can intellectually accept “love your enemies,” until someone – you know the someone – replies to our Facebook post. Oh, the cloud is a distant memory then, the mountaintop giving way to the deepest valley, as far from the presence of God and holiness that we might be able to get, for knowing is one thing…but doing is another. And, Jesus reminds us again and again – doing is better. Doing, not understanding, is how we build faith.

Jesus has to take the disciples a few thousand feet up to pray and be subjected to a laser-light, fog machine, special-effects show in order to get them to some small measure of faith…he also immediately removes them from that experience, taking them back down the mountain, and telling them not to tell the others about it at all. This, Jesus is saying without saying it, is the center of faith…it comes without knowing. If you know, you don’t have any need of faith. And we need faith, especially in these days.

Peter, as he witnesses this magical apparition in front of him, surrounded by this glory, wants to stay there, enclosed in this cloud. He wants to build tents and stay as close to that Presence as he can, because it’s a close to understanding as he’s been. It’s a familiar feeling. We all want God to be clear and present and relevant – a tour guide for our lives who tells us precisely where to see the good stuff and also where the bathrooms are located. Neither Peter nor we get that. Instead, we get mystery. We get presence, but presence that only shows up in the corner of our eyes, before disappearing when we turn to look at it. We get support, as much from one another, we followers of the lit-up cloud, as from the cloud itself. For in my mind’s eye, the disciples don’t come down off the mountain and never speak of it again…they talk of it often, sharing with one another their deep rootedness in the presence, the stories of God being with us from generations past, of the interconnectedness of the human and the Holy, granting a peace that passes all our understanding.

It is our last Sunday before Lent begins – Fat Tuesday is a couple of days away and then we gather for Ash Wednesday this Wednesday. This marks the final moments of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, this time of joy replaced with a time of reflection.

I’ll be here in the sanctuary to mark you with ashes from 7-8am on Wednesday morning, again from noon-1, and then we’ll have our full service at 7pm that night, with ashes and communion. Why invest so highly in this? Well, because, like the cloud, the ashes mark us with God’s presence, which is something we never fully understand. The ashes help us to hold onto what Paul set forth when he wrote that, “now we see through a glass, but dimly.” Not only do we not see God clearly, we don’t even see ourselves clearly. This Wednesday we remember our mortality as a way of reminding ourselves we aren’t the be-all, end-all. We are limited, even on our best days. Such humility is not meant to belittle our humanity, or to make us feel bad about ourselves. It makes us feel small in the very best meaning of that word – part of a a much larger whole, like witnessing the stars in the sky on a clear night, when you feel a tiny part of a vast universe. We say, “You are dust and to dust you shall return” because it brings some strange comfort to embrace our finitude, it centers for us how much we don’t understand, and that our forward movement isn’t dependent on our complete understanding, just like we were standing on a mountaintop surrounded by mysteriousness and hearing the voice of God telling us exactly what we should trust in.

The story today reminds us that we are to go back from our moments of connection with the Holy, to take those moments with us, remembering them when we have the more frequent encounters with the less-than-holy. It helps us remember that God’s presence is not something we can tie down, or control, or bend to our will, and that there’s no way to walk through life without fear. Life is scary…as the famous Breton fisherman’s prayer says – O God, your sea is so great and my boat is so small – which awakens in us our sense of faith, of holy dependence, of the good and meaningful need for one another. The voice in that cloud reminds us to listen to Jesus, who tells us in so many ways, almost as often as anything else – don’t be afraid. It is the same message of Joy – we sing the Christmas classic “Joy to the World” not because it mentions the birth of Jesus, it does not, but because it announces his world-transforming presence. By singing it we sing away the fear, embracing the teachings of Jesus, even beyond our understanding, welcoming in a whole kind of way, with truth and grace, Jesus showing us the wonders of God’s love.

As we enter the season of Lent, I hope that we find ways to focus on this, to remember, or even make room for, our own mountaintop experiences, and that we seek the one who stands in that great cloud of unknowing with us – for he is God’s beloved, and you are his, and whatever comes next, God is with us, our faith is strong enough, and we are up to it. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 119 & Matthew 5:21-37

Often in our Bible study class on Sunday mornings we wrestle with the scripture because of what we have inherited. Some of us come from a more legalistic background, some of us were raised memorizing scriptures but not really studying them, and almost all of us were raised in an atmosphere where the Bible is the “word of God,” infallible and without error, a claim that holds a lot of water, until you actually read the Bible. Then you find things that are troubling, even appalling, written in it’s pages. You find contradictions and rules that seem, at best, archaic. And so many take the option that seems most logical – they throw it all out. Oh, they may still attend church, even read the Bible, but it’s power has been stunted.

Still, I don’t think that we can just jettison scripture. Jesus, after all, uses scripture.

Like any other rabbi of his time, Jesus holds to Torah, the “Law” as it is sometimes referred to in Judaism, and the Prophets. He quotes them and even says that he is not here to abolish the law but to fulfill it. And fulfilling the law, it would seem, means changing it to some degree. Jesus consistently and openly flouts seemingly sacred taboos, like not working on the Sabbath, not meeting with women, not eating with sinners and non-Jews, not touching lepers, and many of the so-called “purity codes” in general. He minimizes or even replaces commandments, as when he tells a rich young man that it is good that he has obeyed the Ten Commandments, but what he really needs to do is sell everything and give the money to the poor. And Jesus feels free to reinterpret the Law—like here, for example, when he says, six times in a row, “The Law says . . . but I say…”

It is a direct rebuttal to those in his own day and time who would say to the people that every line and word of every law must be explicitly and unwaveringly obeyed, or you have failed in God’s intricate and nearly impossible goal for your life. We, too, know of those who make such a claim today, even in the name of this same Jesus. They hold up the Bible as a rulebook, a measure, which they are only too happy to use as judgment against you and your “lifestyle” choices, wielding the scriptures as if they were a prosecutor in a trial lifting high the statutes of the district.

But before I totally disparage that approach, let’s take a moment and give some benefit of the doubt. If you have no rulebook, how do you play the game? It’s like trying to put together a piece of IKEA furniture without the directions, it is really hard…heck, it’s hard to put it together with the directions. Living by a set of inflexible rules may seem oppressive to some, yet can we allow that it might be seen as easier than living in the dynamics of relationship? If you have to feel your way through building that furniture – well, that’s just too challenging for some to imagine. Just think for a moment about a close relationship you have. Wouldn’t it be easier if you knew what to expect, if there were clear boundaries on everything and you didn’t have to spend time and energy communicating or interpreting, if you didn’t have to negotiate things because the rules were completely dictated? It would be easier. Not necessarily better, not more fulfilling…perhaps much more boring…but easier. And, Jesus tells us with his apparent disobedience of the Law, easy may not be our charge as disciples.

This living “outside” the law, or by the “law of love,” isn’t unique to Jesus. In many ways, Jesus is carrying on the rabbinic tradition, encapsulated by a famous saying of Jesus, that isn’t his at all. It is traceable to story from the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish rabbinic commentary. In this story, two first-century-BCE rabbinic sages, Hillel and Shammai, debate. Hillel is the Jewish archetypal tolerant “loose interpreter” of the Law, while Shammai models the exacting and inflexible “strict constructionist.”

A gentile comes to both, intending to provoke them, and asks to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one leg. Shammai is indeed provoked and gives the man an angry whack with a measuring rod. Yet Hillel replies, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — now go study.”

This is not a dismissal of the Torah, not a belittling of the Law. Quite the contrary, it is asking for deeper study, for reflection, for an absorption that brings the law beyond a wooden rule into a deeply lived experiential guide. The letter of the law gives way to the spirit of the law in a maturation that is a critical part of spiritual development.

What Jesus offers us here is not oversimplified into spiritual anarchy – there are no rules!! Let’s go crazy and God’s Grace will cover us all. God’s Grace does cover us all, but not to release us from responsibility or consequence. At a time in which laws and traditions are being very publicly and visibly bucked in the name of personal ambition, we ought to make sure we understand what Jesus is modeling here.

In his brilliant letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. King wrote, “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” The trick, of course, is in the discernment. How does one know when a law is unjust? What is unjust to you may seem perfectly reasonable to someone else. And what is the disobedience meant to produce? Is it ignoring boundaries that are inconvenient or limiting to you personally, or disobeying unjust laws to facilitate the dismantling of systems that oppress and control entire groups? Those are very different things.

This, of course, presents us with a particular challenge. Psalm 119 couldn’t be any clearer –

“Happiness comes to those whose way is blameless,

who walk in Your law, Holy One.

Happiness comes to those who keep God’s decrees…”

The tradition seems to tell us unequivocally to obey the law, to be sticklers for it’s observance. If you read this alone, without context or interpretation, it might seem like the best way to be loving, since if you love someone you want them to be happy, is to enforce the rules, to get into the business of “sin management,” checking off the list and seeing who’s naughty and nice, like a sanctimonious Santa Claus. Yet that same tradition is full of stories of people who don’t follow the rules. Genesis has many accounts of the great heroes and sheroes of antiquity disobeying the standard practices, ignoring the traditions and rebelling against the rules that have been supposedly laid down by God in the name of God. Jesus is another in a long line of folks who see God leading them away from the tradition, expanding the limits of the time with the blessing of a God who is always saying, Behold! I am doing something brand new! Do you not perceive it?!

All of this brings to question the authority of scripture. Jesus is actually setting that authority aside, or at least taking it down a peg. And in our world of “The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it,” this is a major stumbling block. Jesus has a willingness to claim scripture not as an ending point that “settles it” but as a beginning point from which we pull base-level values, and re-form them in our own context. Biblical authority then is not slavish devotion to a written word, but a dedication to the inspirational process, the engagement with the Holy Spirit, in our language, that began when that scripture was first uttered, but doesn’t stop there.

Here in the UCC one of our slogans is, “God is still speaking.” It is a quote from the famous theologian, Gracie Allen. Just to be inclusive in the references, Gracie Allen was once the comedic foil to George Burns, and his wife, for many years on radio, stage and TV shows. What it means has many layers. It means that we don’t just take the King James translation – itself a work of process and interpretation – and act as if that is the written word of God. It means that we understand that the Bible is a human product, or at least a divinely inspired product interpreted through human eyes, which means we have to approach it with care, study, discernment and humility about it’s authority. And finally, “God is still speaking” means that, like Jesus, we believe that God’s Grace and Power does not end with the Bible, it is at work right now, urging us to expand our own vision, to take the principles our ancestors left us and advance them when and where we are – right now!

What our slogan claims for us is that the Bible might indeed be the final authority if God were dead, or somehow removed from the lives of humanity. But we don’t see it that way. In fact, we see God as active and participating in our lives, and God’s Love as the creative and moving force that compels and inspires us to act in the world. We don’t reject the authority of scripture, we simply want to re-evaluate it’s position on the authority hierarchy. If we, “have prophetic powers,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and…have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, [we are] nothing.” Love must be the operative law, the one that moves us forward, expanding the previous boundaries. Jesus’ words still ring true – “The point is not to be faithful to the Scriptures, but to be faithful to the living God who continues to be present among us.”

The Rev. D. Mark Davis, pastor at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, says it this way – The accounts of creation, the Ten Words on Mt. Sinai, the stories of the people of Israel, assorted types of Psalms, proverbs, and prophetic utterances, as well as the words that Jesus is speaking in this text, are all ways of “scripturing” – a verb rather than a noun. It is not the written accounts themselves, but the real incarnation of God’s word through God’s people that is the point. “Scripturing” is the act of giving witness to that presence. As such, Jesus’ words here do not signify the ‘final revision’ of old Mosaic laws. They signify a way of “scripturing” God’s presence, which will always be a way of being faithful as long as God is living among us.

When Jesus says, You have heard it said, but I say,” he is not doing away with rules or boundaries. In fact, he just establishes new ones with his pronouncements. He makes the rules more challenging – asking us not to return violence for violence, but to reach for a better way…asking us not to judge others but to recognize the sin in our own hearts…telling us that loving the neighbors we already like isn’t enough – we must love even our enemies. God is still-speaking because God is, through our prophets and our discernment, still asking us to go deeper, to love more fully, to draw our circles wider and to offer the same grace that God offers to us, living our lives as an act of “scripturing,” giving witness to the living God who is still-speaking in our midst, the God who is making all things new.

This is the whole of our Law. The rest is commentary — now go study.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Scripture: Matthew 5:13-16
Contemporary Reading: Walt Whitman’s poem, O Me! O Life!

If you are like me, then this last week has been a sharp slap in the face, reminding you that you are in the minority from an idealogical and political position, and that the values being lived out all around you, in the papers and on TV, are not the values you hold dear. Maybe it’s just been confusing, or off-putting, to see this kind of turmoil and division.  It might bring you here this morning feeling downtrodden, depressed, weathered and beaten up a little and the Gospel has good news for you this morning…
The word that Jesus has for you in the midst of your struggle is – good.

It’s good that you are feeling this way, not because it’s a good way to feel but rather because this is a sign that you have not lost your saltiness. Please remember that just last week in our time together the Matthew reading had Jesus saying…

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,
for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Now, maybe that doesn’t sound like what you wanted to hear when you came to church this morning…maybe it sounds like the exact opposite of what you wanted to hear. I can appreciate that. It’s been a long week and some deep despair about where it feels like things are headed, what sort of actions are becoming normalized, and how far we are drifting from any sense of accountability. On top of that, there is this casting of shade, this gaslighting that appears like it’s designed to make you think this is all in your head and you’re the unreasonable one with all of your talk of bigotry and abuse.
I’m not sure where you are, but I’m in a place where I don’t think that things are going to turn out very well. The faith I have placed in politics and the power of organizing feels spent, and I’m thinking about a future that looks pretty bleak. Then the message I hear from this past week of study is – yep, you probably should feel like that.

Thanks, Jesus. You’re a big help.

That could be the end of this sermon, the unhelpful Jesus delivering us equally unhelpful news about the certainty of our suffering. But let’s recognize that Jesus doesn’t stop there, with the admonition to be joyful for your persecution. He goes on, speaking this “Sermon on the Mount” to people beaten down, to those tired of the status quo, to a gathered collection of folks who understand, even if only subconsciously, that what the empire blesses and what God blesses are very different things and there’s something really wrong with the current state of affairs.

After Jesus has laid out the list of things that are blessed, a list that seems almost laughable given the world in which they live, he then turns (I imagine) and looks directly at those around him. Be joyous when you get persecuted for standing against the existing state of affairs, for you are in good company, with heaven applauding you. You are salt…salt for the earth. And you are light…light in the world.

Jesus uses metaphors that come from the lived experiences of the people he’s preaching to – images like salt and light. These days we use a little salt can bring the flavors of something alive. Chefs say on all those dedicated cooking shows that we’re supposed to season our food in layers, using salt and pepper with every ingredient we add. Meanwhile our doctors tell us to cut down on the salt, once of the two major ingredients that the manufactured food industry has been putting in everything. In Jesus time, salt was not so controversial. In fact, it held a high place of honor as a necessary food preservative, a part of the ritual butchering process for kosher food and even as a medicinal balm, though hopefully not on open wounds. So much more than a convenient source of flavor, salt was essential to life.

So, be the things that are essential to life, Jesus tells them. But there’s another component of salt that is important in this metaphor. Too much of it runs everything. Have you ever been in a restaurant where someone thought it was clever to unscrew the lid of the salt shaker, or have you mistaken the salt for the sugar? Both have happened to me and the meal that followed was…unpleasant.

Be salt – be the essential things. And don’t feel like you have to cover everything…don’t feel like you must be the entire seasoning, all of the essential things for the whole world. According to Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, the go-to sources for New Testament era cultural information, the metaphor comes from stoves in the ancient Mediterranean which used dung for fuel. Palestinians from the first century placed flat plates of salt on the bottom of their earthen ovens to activate the fire. After some years, the salt plates in the earthen oven underwent a chemical reaction due to the heat. The result was that the salt no longer facilitated the fire, but rather impeded and stifled the burning of the dung…the salt “lost it’s saltiness.” Given that information, the people gathered to learn from Jesus might have heard that he was saying – be salt, be the catalyst to get things cooking, but don’t be only salt, or think that all of the cooking has to come from you. You’ll burn out.

Malina and Rohrbaugh also tell us that for first century people, darkness was a constant. We are not used to this at all because we have all kinds of artificial lights all around us…so much so that we forget what deep darkness is like. But then, when the sun went down, that was it. Most households had small lamps that burned olive oil, but produced only a small amount of ambient light. The typical way for such a lamp to be put out was under a bushel basket, since it would trap the smoke and fumes as the family went to sleep. Be light, but don’t hide it, let it shine. That greek word translated as shine is only used once more in Matthew, during the transfiguration, when Jesus is bathed in the light of God and connected, on another mountaintop, to the prophets who came before him. That shine we’re meant to have seems to have something to do with our rootedness, with our sense of being connected to something larger than just us – filled with the light of community, of tradition, and of God all at once.

All of that brings me back to this place – our church – in the midst of the turmoil I talked about at the start of the sermon. So we gather on our own hillside, listening for Jesus, longing for answers, for some solution to the problems that plague us and we have this same unhelpful answer staring right back at us still – be joyful that you are struggling. It means your values are solid. It means your hearts are in the right place. It means your humanity and your connections to the divine are still intact. And, just like 2000 years ago in the Holy Land, this advice follows, advice which I find increasingly helpful. Be salt. Be light. Not so much salt that you are considered “salty,” you know? Not so much that you ruin the stew, but enough to season it. And be light. Not so much light that you are just “lit,” chasing only the latest fad, investing only in things if they are entertaining…and not so much light that you blind anyone who gets near you, keeping them from being able to see their own path. Just enough light to light your own path, to be able to see what’s going on around you, to let it shine enough that you make a small hole in the deep night, whose shadow threatens us all.

I am pulled deeper and deeper into this metaphor because I am profoundly aware of how tired people are around me. Swimming against the current is exhausting, and when you live in a place where you have to swim not only against politics nationally, but politics locally, even down to the act of putting on your mask each day when you go to work, or hiding your opinion, biting your lip or holding your voice down in family gatherings, the board meeting, the holiday party, the table in the big, public dining room of the restaurant…it is relentless. And how, we might feel with heaviness and depth…how can we make a difference? How can we change the whole entire world?

And my answer this morning is not “do more.” And it isn’t “do nothing,” either. Here’s my own metaphor – the parable of the cyclist. We’ve probably all seen cyclists riding in great packs, one behind the other or maybe two abreast as they cruise down the road. There’s a rhythm and a routine to that. The lead rider sets the pace, expelling a lot of energy to do so. The rest of the riders enjoy “drafting,” where they can take the wind block the lead rider also provides and expend less energy. Then a shift happens – the lead rider will signal and drop back, pulling to the side and slowing so the line can pass her and she can drift into the back spot, the second cyclist now becoming the lead. And that’s the routine that follows. The only way that the strongest rider among them can truly have their best race is with the team. The only way that the best outcome can be achieved is if there is action and rest, participation and presence, word and deed.

The lesson we get from this morning is – you can’t change the whole world. At least not by yourself. But then again, that’s not your job. It’s not any of our jobs. That’s God’s job. Our job is to be salt and light. What that means here in our time and place has been made much more clear to me over the past few days. If we are to seek blessing, in the language of the Beatitudes, it won’t be in the regular venues, or using the same tools we’ve used. We can choose retreat into our echo chambers, which are prevalent and prolific, increasing the division by choosing to participate in the recipe that is set before us. We can choose to escape, to numb the discomfort with all kinds of distractions. OR…we can add a little salt to the mix. We can curse the darkness or we can light a candle. And those pinches of salt, those small flames from our single candles…they do matter. Just like the acorn that grows into a mighty oak, God takes the small and makes it the all.

So in this time of great turmoil and upheaval, I’m going to suggest something simple…so ludicrously simple that it may seem trivial to you. Write down the salt and light you see in the world. Like keep a journal where you jot down every instance of goodness and hope that you witness, even the tiniest thing. Or come to church each week and write those things on the gratitude slips that are in your pews and put them in the offering plate. It will serve two purposes – instead of numbing when you get stressed, you can read that journal or remember those slips and be inspired. AND – perhaps most importantly – you will develop your eyes and ears for the salt and light in the world.

Why do we need to develop our sense for that? Well, friends, we’re back to the start…because it is good that you feel this weight upon you. It means you still have a sense of what our scriptures call “righteousness,” an awareness that this is not the way things should be. Blessed are you to be salt seasoning the blandness of the status quo…blessed are you to be light in a time of darkness…ALL of you, because that’s what it takes. All of us, each salt and light where we are, with what we have, trusting that the small things we do bring great changes…

God be with us on the journey. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Micah 6:1-8 & Matthew 5:1-12

This morning we are presented with a small section of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, one of my favorite parts of this gospel, and scripture as a whole, which we call “The Beatitudes. These “beatitudes” are not unique to Matthew’s gospel, nor the New Testament, nor even the Bible. They are a widely used literary form in the Greco-Roman world and within Jewish wisdom literature and apocalyptic writings. We often think this word, “blessed,” is a word that is equivalent to happy. “Have a happy day”, we might hear from the cashier when they say “blessed,” adding only that we probably assume they are Christian, maybe even that they attend an evangelical church, for this is found often in the lingo of such strands of Christianity. But “blessed” does not equal happy. The word being used, in Greek, is makarios, and it’s meaning is a little more nuanced than just happy. It’s not a feeling, it is a declaration – God announcing newness into the world, a hopeful promise connected first to certain people and then to certain actions.

Blessing is a mark, a way of indicating who counts…which is a sobering reality in a prosperity gospel where the shiny new Mercedes has a license plate that reads “blessed,” only with a vowel or two missing. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “blessed are those who mourn,” “blessed are the meek” are not things that make sense as praiseworthy in our culture, nor did they in Jesus’ time. They run (and ran) counter to the cultural norms, as direct confrontations of the systems in which people live. Blessed are the poor “in spirit” is not a sentimentalized “poor,” (there is no “in spirit” in Luke’s version of this, by the way) not a declaration of blessing on those who are voluntarily poor or those who express deep humility. This is a claim that mirrors beatitudes from Isaiah that address those who have been made poor, those living in social and economic hardship. And the same is true of the mourners and the meek…this is a vision, an announcement of an era to come that will turn this oppressive time on it’s head. In Luke’s gospel he makes this point more sharply, having Jesus quote Isaiah in his first sermon ever, just before the Beatitudes, preaching Isaiah 61:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;

Jesus isn’t assembling a strange list of prescriptions to us, like you should be really docile and submissive, or get super good at grieving. He is not even talking about what heaven will look like, or what could happen if we were all “good enough” to earn God’s blessing. He is evoking a counter-cultural turn, a new kin-dom brought to reality by the power of God, lived in the here-and-now…a God whose love for us is so full and complete that it is justice itself…justice that will be visited upon the world, a vision which probably ought to induce equal parts anticipation and terror in humankind.

It can be easy to look at the last 900 years of human history and think the only thing that we’ve gained is a date on the calendar that is a palindrome – that’s today, 02/02/2020, read the same backwards and forwards. Cool, but not exactly high on the moral achievements list. Yet, what we might really need to lament is our vision. Scant few folks have developed the kinds of eyes that Jesus asks us to see with as he imparts the beatitudes…we are often too trapped in our cultural webs to break free enough to see the

kin-dom all around us.

In the New Testament world, the esteem you commanded was in large part a function of how important your connections were — your family members, your patrons, and your clients. If you were part of a very important family, whether by birth, adoption, or being a slave or freed-person you were important. If your family was less important, you were less important. If you weren’t connected to others with status, that didn’t make you “a self-made man”; it made you nobody. As you might imagine, this structure created all kinds of inequalities and an absolute iron curtain of haves and have-nots, with virtually no way to bridge that gap, no bootstraps, no boots, no “self-made” nothing. You were born into your lot in life, and that was about it…a system heavily favored and enforced by those at it’s top. Why would they want it to change? Religion and culture often supported these inequities, dictating social and tribal and gender boxes for people and enforcing the oppression with theology and ritual and tradition.

This is part of what made the Jesus movement so controversial. His followers, following his lead, began to step over those lines, eating with the unclean, refusing to participate in the economic systems of the time and lifting up the status of women in ways that really bucked the status quo. It was shameful, SHAMEFUL — like taking a knee during the national anthem or blocking heavy equipment at a pipeline construction site, or electing a gay bishop. Jesus’ followers did all of the things that weren’t supposed to render blessing at all, so you might understand how strange it was to hear him saying what made for blessing…declaring who exactly God was saying mattered.

What is really at work in the Beatitudes can be lost on us, or rather it can be too hard to see…like so challenging we don’t want to see it. And it was then, too. So we have a double issue – the beatitudes are like parables, hard to understand, AND they weren’t written for us…they were spoken to his disciples, who were right next to Jesus, learning directly from him and it still took them years to understand even in part.

Our biggest issue may be that we limit the Beatitudes, trying to force them into the framework of a personal message, something about our own piety, or how we live our life, when Jesus is actually subverting the entire structure. He grants people who are completely shamed in his culture with honor…and not only honor, but honor from God. In front of all the crowds, Jesus grants honor to them, declaring that these are the people whom the God of Israel blesses. Their own families may have disowned them, their culture may cast them out, but they are children of the God who created the universe, to whom all honor belongs. It is a magnificent and amazing declaration that turned the world upside down at Jesus’ time…and still does.

Just a few years ago, the Right Reverend Dr. Jeffrey John was nominated by the Anglican Church to be a Bishop, the first man openly in a same-sex relationship to be thus nominated by the Church of England. As you might imagine, he faced lots of scrutiny, many calls akin to his unworthiness, his uncleanliness, his shame. He still serves in the Church, though not as a bishop, despite numerous nominations, and is married to his partner of 30+ years, even though the church only allows clergy to be in a same-sex marriage if they are celibate.

In 2005, he wrote this prayer…

Lord, do something about your Church.
It is so awful, it is hard not to feel ashamed of belonging to it.
Most of the time it seems to be all the things you condemned:
hierarchical, conventional, judgmental, hypocritical,
respectable, comfortable, moralising, compromising,
clinging to its privileges and worldly securities,
and when not positively objectionable, merely absurd.

Lord, we need your whip of cords.
Judge us and cleanse us,
challenge and change us,
break and remake us.

Help us to be what you called us to be.
Help us to embody you on earth.
Help us to make you real down here,
and to feed your people bread instead of stones.
And start with me.

At a moment in which the church is making these same assertions about “purity” and the supposed claims of scripture…when it is reading the red letters of Jesus’ words in one moment and supporting the bloody actions of power, corruption and greed in another, it is perhaps time to ask ourselves again — what does God require of us?  For the answer is the same as it was to Micah, I think – not sacrifices of blood, not impressive buildings, not achievement or so-called “respectability.” Not power or wealth nor a seat at the highest table: just justice, and mercy, and humility…and a seat at this table, the table where all are welcome, where food and drink are offered without a means assessment, and in a small bite of bread and sip of juice, a table where we’re not just saying “let’s all get along,” we’re subverting the system. Maybe that sounds naively simple, but let me assure you…if we were to take seriously the implications of the Beatitudes…if we were to trust in communion’s claim on inclusion…if we were to simply seek justice, love kindness and take our steps with humility in the presence of our God….it would turn the world upside-down. Blessed are the marginalized, for they are extravagantly welcome in the culture of God…Blessed are the empathetic, for they heal the brokenness of the world…Blessed are those who organize, struggle and sacrifice for freedom and equality, for they bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

We know now that time of the great turning-of-the-world, the arrival of the kin-dom of God wasn’t then…

maybe it’s not now…

but, in faith, we believe…amen, amen, it shall be so.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 27:1, 7-14 (The Inclusive Psalms translation)

1 Corinthians 1:10-18 (New Revised Standard translation)

Today we hold our annual meeting, a chance to revisit the year past and vision the year ahead, a time to enjoy good food and good company, another chapter in a tradition that has gone on for 70 years. Yes, 70 years! This year marks Fellowship Congregational United Church of Christ’s 70^th year of existence and while we’re saving the big celebration for year 75, it does seem like a good time to briefly discuss the history of this church. We began in April of 1950, officially according to the paperwork in my office, gathered together from a split of Second Presbyterian Church. The split, source of many new churches, came from a disagreement over membership. See, the founding pastor of Fellowship, The Reverend Dr. Jackson Smith, had moved to Tulsa from a place where segregation was not as prominent as it was here in Tulsa. So, when some black folks began attending Second Presbyterian, he welcomed them and the rest of the church – or at least a lot of the rest of the church – did not.

The Presbytery, the larger governing body of that church, asked Rev. Smith to resign, but the congregation, despite vocal grumbling, voted against his resignation. Some began to develop a plan “B”, in case these troubles continued and, soon after, the Presbytery vetoed the congregational vote and Dr. Smith was ousted. So, Plan “B” kicked in and on March 4^th, 1950, about 200 attended initial services at the Seventh Day Adventist Church at 9^th and south New Haven. In attendance was the Rev. Royal J. Gibson, Conference Minister of the Congregational Christian Churches. And on April 5^th, 1950, at an organizational meeting held at Temple Israel, at 16^th and Rockford, Fellowship was born. The charter roll had 300 names. At the second anniversary on April 6^th, 1952, the new church site was dedicated at 29^th and Harvard, the contract valued at $60,000. The rest, as they say, is history.

But that’s not all. After the initial split, and the reason that Dr. Smith left Second Presbyterian, you’d think that racial division would not be part of the rest of the story at Fellowship. And you’d be wrong. It wasn’t but 6 years after the initial foundation of Fellowship that membership for an African-American couple was brought up again…and denied. It almost split the church once more until foundational values were reasserted and, in 1957, the congregation voted (not unanimously, mind you) to open membership to all persons regardless of race or class…a vote that would have to be revisited as we drew our circle wider. We also in that same year took in a displaced European family, the first of many families we would protect as refugees to this country, later ones coming from Cuba and Vietnam and Cambodia. All of these acts let us see ourselves in a new light, and re-imagine what it meant to be church.

A few fun facts I uncovered when I found a whole bunch of historical documents…

• In 1963, FCC hosted First Baptist Church North at a dinner – the start of a long connection between our two churches across the racial lines of Tulsa, until leadership changed at First Baptist Church North and we became open and affirming. We’ll have to re-imagine what such connections might look like in the future.
• In 1979, the tower that used to stand above the entrance to the north doors at the main building was removed due to repeated lightning strikes. I will let you make of that what you will.
• Then in 1995, we voted again on an issue that was not unanimous – we became an open and affirming church, one of a tiny few in Tulsa at the time, welcoming what we then called gays and lesbians, later LGBT, then LGBTQ and now LGBTQ+ as we expand that circle, always re-imagining our welcome.

History matters. It tells us not only who we were, but reveals some of who we are. We can see in even a brief glimpse that we are a church that values justice and, like all human endeavors, is not immune to injustice. A glimpse backwards can help propel us forwards, affording us a chance to do some re-framing.

I spent the end of last week at my alma mater, Phillips Seminary, for the Remind & Renew Conference, where, amongst others, the good Rev. Dr. Ward was featured heavily as he rounds out his tenure at Phillips. I do have to say that I am glad that Richard was not my preaching professor because I would have had to have spent the last 6 years staring at him – or him staring at me – during every sermon. However, I have grown increasingly aware of how good a trade that would have been as I witness his teaching for friends and colleagues, as I see his great skill and wish I could have had more of it shaping me…at least in an official manner, for I think I’ve learned a lot from you by proximity alone! I say all of that to butter him up a little because I’m getting ready to steal a metaphor directly from his talk right now.

Richard spoke of trips back to his home in South Carolina to visit his mother and sister and to kind of “go through” things since his father died last year. As they looked through pictures that had been sitting on shelves, perhaps for decades, they noticed that the frames were cracking, or the glue was separating on the corners, or the glass was broken. Of course they wanted to keep the memories that the pictures represent, so they had to reframe them, to move them from one set of boundaries to another …not so the pictures could be done away with, but so that they could be preserved in a new way.

A metaphorical reframing can come in lots of forms. Paul speaks of reframing, without ever using the word or metaphor in his letters as a critical component of following Jesus. He calls it dying to one life and being born to another. The reality of reframing is not a new thing to us, some of us have lost someone dear to us and had it change our identity as partner, parent or caregiver. Sometimes we lose a job, or we are moved by our parents, or we get the diagnosis, or we find some other transformational impact visited upon us without our choice. What is reframing like when it is something we are choosing? I mean, let’s be honest. None of us have to be Christian…or, obviously, we can choose to call ourselves Christian and not really adjust our lives at all.

As Paul writes these letters to his churches, he is not building a new religion, but rather trying to help the Gentiles – all people who aren’t Jewish – to be in relationship with God in the way that Jews are, only through this path that Jesus has set forth. He’s teaching people who are fed up and oppressed by the culture in which they live. He’s telling them, like Jesus did, that in order for them to see this new world, they must first have to believe it. It’s not as simple as going to the crafts store, getting the right size and undoing those little pins or the turny-things that fit into grooves to hole the picture in place. It’s not changing the curtains or repackaging the old way of being. Paul speaks of re-framing as soul repair, as repentance, as transformation. You can’t continue with the status quo and be people of the kin-dom. Somebody has snitched on you Corinthians, Paul writes. They say you are building factions, making a big deal out of which person baptized you instead of realizing what baptism is for in the first place. It sounds, Paul says in so many words, like you don’t get it. There’s no re-framing going on at all…you’re just shuffling around pictures on the mantle.

I think we’d do well to remember that these “churches” Paul writes to in his letters are nothing like ours. They have no brick and mortar structure, no mortgage or insurance payments, no parking lots to re-stripe, no HVAC units to replace, no argument about pews versus chairs. They aren’t places that people come to once a week to hear a good word. They are social change engines. They are base communities in the midst of an empire that doesn’t want them around. They are the resistance. Only Paul is informing them that they aren’tresisting…they’re just doing the same stuff with a different name. He gets mean…Paul calls them out on their warping of baptism and literally thanks God that he did not baptize them, though he remembers mid-sentence that he baptized Crispus and Gaius…and then remembers the household of Stephanas…and then admits there may have been more. The angry retort is kind of muted at this point, but who can remember all those baptisms? He just wants them to hear that if they’re looking for wisdom the way the world sees it, if they’re measuring their faith with the same metrics as culture, if they’re trying to “succeed” at following Jesus the same way they succeed as a Roman citizen, they’ve come to the wrong place. Paul looks around Imperial Rome and he sees injustice of the highest levels, oppression, inequality, suffering, and he believes that the kingdom, the new age being ushered in by Jesus’ resurrection, will be a kingdom of justice and peace that does not come at the tip of a spear. But in order to establish that kingdom, we have to live it. To be faithful, in Paul’s estimation, is to be resistant.

I wonder what Paul would be writing now, with a church having so much distance between what it says and what it does, when the words in red in our Bibles have been taught as the guidelines for life, and yet are ignored when they are politically inconvenient. And here we are, at Fellowship, where, for the past 70 years, we, too, have wrestled with how to be a Christian and live in Tulsa, Oklahoma which, despite all it’s grandiose claims, governs itself much more with the power of Rome than the power of God.

That assertion alone is why we ought to strive to treat one another differently, if only when we are in the walls of this campus. Our meetings run differently, our conversations a contrast to what we hear beyond, our decision-making impacted by the realities of the world, but driven by another set of values…at least on our best days. For this is what our history (and our now) say to us – we must still be about the work of re-framing…our selves, our church, our world.

The psalmist writes, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” It is an act of reframing, for the sentences around this statement reveal a person who is very much afraid, and likely for good reason. And here we are, with all of the uncertainty and angst around us, with the problems we can see daily running through our social media feeds or delivered on the news source of our choice, vying for our attention as we engage in a race to see who can be the most “woke” or the most outraged, and we often lose the chance to see the kin-dom all around us…a reframing that helps make the kin-dom real, and helps us be less afraid, for we have each other and a God whose promises are trustworthy.

This is what I see when I look at you, church. Not with precision or perfection…but with participation. I see you eagerly cooking food for the hungry, volunteering at the front desk of hospitals and shelters, collecting endless plastic bags to be woven into sleeping pads, talking with one another, building relationships with people who’ve never had a church that accepted them, visiting those who are sick or in prison, and seeking ways to talk about what matters.

The harvest is ready and the workers, it always seems, Jesus, are few. But we are here, at a place that has often sought a vision for the kin-dom, and been willing – albeit sometimes slowly – to draw it’s circle wider, to sacrifice for what is next and to look for the kin-dom all around us.

In his sermon on the 30^th anniversary of his pastorate here, The Rev. Dr. Russell Bennett asked from this pulpit that the people of Fellowship use this church as a place to awaken their spiritual gifts. He, too, used Paul for the sermon, only a different cut from

1 Corinthians, one about many spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit. He asked people to seek those gifts in themselves, and to consider finding a home for those gifts in the church, because they “serve God’s purpose to heal a fragmented world.” “It’s why the church exists,” he wrote, “to be an instrument of God’s peace and justice. It’s why we pray for, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth…And why we organize, have meetings, develop budgets and programs; it is that we might be a vehicle of God’s Grace in the world.” That, I would say, is reframing. We do the work here, the re-imagining here, the reframing here – so we can carry that out into the world and begin to see it there…so we’ll have the eyes for it.

This is a time for reframing, my friends. How will the reframing we have chosen help us to navigate the reframing that we are not choosing? How will we make meaning out of the noise that is going on around us and seek newness in the midst of turmoil? How will we seek the next chapter for us as a church, drawing our circle wider, growing in spirit and working for justice? I don’t know what the next year will bring for Fellowship, much less the next 70. But I do know that we will have to welcome again the Holy Spirit among us, teaching us, opening us to newness, showing us risks to take that, if we have the courage, will bring us closer to God.

May God be with us on the way. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

1 Corinthians 1:1-9 & John 1:29-42

It is this time of year that the words of Dr. King rise up again in the media, on posts and in speeches. Tomorrow, along with a predictably cold forecast, there will be a parade in his honor, remembering the man who helped usher in a civil rights movement that changed the landscape and, hopefully, will continue to change the landscape, for I dare say he’d believe the work is far from done. Yet this honoring often comes whitewashed – and I use that term deliberately. It gives us a sanitized King, like we often get an edited version of Jesus. So we hear the lifting up of “content of character” or “I have a dream,” but don’t hear, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” or “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.” We will be handed images of people holding hands across color lines, or requests for a day of service at the food bank in his name, but we will likely not be challenged with King’s ideas that, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Often, especially as time goes by, we domesticate our prophets, lest their words convict us still. And what is true of Dr. King is true also of Christ Jesus and the Apostle Paul. There are lots of folks, some seated right here, who don’t hold Paul in very high regard because his words have some pretty terrible history to them. Interestingly, the latest research from scholars has shifted from work on the historical Jesus to work on Paul, and the discoveries reveal that what has happened to the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Dr. King has also happened with Paul, maybe even to a much higher degree. It’s important clarification because, it could easily be said, the church is as much structured around Paul’s decrees, maybe even more, as it is the teachings of Jesus. This is why we’re joining in this “unpacking” of Paul in the adult Sunday School class on First Corinthians – 9:30am in classroom one, if you’d like to come.

What we do know is that Paul writes to churches struggling with their identity, which makes sense as they all live into the “way of Jesus,” something brand new that, at times, Paul seems to be making up as he goes along. But these churches are also fighting the culture around them, a culture that has many moral question marks, a culture that dehumanizes women and promotes the economic exploitation of people who are deemed “less than” through an elaborate and enforced societal norm. The bulk of Paul’s instructions, particularly to this church in Corinth, is to not engage with that behavior. Don’t start with the categorization, building hierarchies within the church. For when you do, you begin to reinforce all of the rest of the stuff in the culture you are rejecting.

It’s like trying to hate hate. It doesn’t work. You have to change the whole dynamic. You cannot drive out hate with hate, only with love. And when you do try to drive out hate with hate, then you bring all that stuff that comes along with hate – inequality, oppression, bigotry, injustice. It’s a system, Paul says without saying it, a system that requires us to re-wire ourselves, to not only have a baptism, where we die to one life and are reborn to another, but also to continue after that baptism, to keep going, to keep dying to that old life, challenging our assumptions and re-wiring all of these things we’ve been taught as part of a culture that is not the “way of Jesus.”

John’s gospel makes this same claim on us, first having John the Baptist identify Jesus as the “lamb of God,” a phrase we might think signifies a sacrificial symbol. Yet, in the ancient world, it is more likely an astrological metaphor, the beginning point of the cosmos is Aries, the ram…the point from which all other constellations are drawn…the apex, in John’s metaphorically rich gospel, of a cosmic Christ, come to set right the balance of the world with the redemptive work that God will be doing through him.

John writes at the uppermost level of metaphor, making Jesus and his story incredibly symbolic of a larger struggle between good and evil, of the literal restoration of the universe in God’s grand vision. But in both Paul’s case and in John’s gospel, the call is the same – come and see. Jesus encounters Andrew and Simon Peter and asks them, “What are you looking for?” They reply, strangely, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” And he says – come and see. And these two invitations – “come and see” and “stay, remain, abide” – they linger in John’s gospel, inviting us to a deeper expression of our faith.

This week we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…a pivotal and prophetic voice in all of our lives, whether we can remember the news accounts directly from the morning paper or we have learned from stock news reel footage, movie adaptations and the accounts of history. His name will be raised, as it always is at this time of year. And there’ll be people singing his praises who wouldn’t have uttered his name unless it was attached to an epithet during his life. For we cannot forget that this person who most corporations in the city will construct a giant float in honor of tomorrow was once the most hated man in America. What might happen if we stayed, if we remained, if we abided with his example and his words of moral meaning? What if we could actually see a thread from Jesus to Paul to Dr. King, woven through history asking us to take seriously those things which actually make for justice and peace?

As I do each year on MLK weekend, I re-read “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” a letter that I think deserves to be in our Biblical canon alongside Paul’s letters. Writing just like Paul often did, from a jail cell, Dr. King lays out his reasons for being in Birmingham, where he is labeled an “outsider,” and calls for justice in the most salient and, sadly, still relevant ways I can imagine. He writes,

“More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

Dr. King takes to task the clergy who are supposedly “supportive” of his goals, but who decry his methods, the ones he calls “white moderates.” Wait, they say…just give it time, as if people of color have not given their oppression time. They call him an extremist, which he writes was initially something that he wanted to refute. But then he wondered…

“Was not Jesus an extremist for love…Was not Amos an extremist for justice…Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel…

So the question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?
Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

As we join in celebrations in his honor and hear politicians and pundits praise him, can we also remember that at the time of his murder, according to a 1968 Harris poll, 75% of those polled disapproved of him, largely because he was calling out the injustice of Vietnam and the cruelty of unfettered capitalism in what he called a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values,” one which would “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.” So, how does Dr. King enjoy approval ratings close to 90% today? Is it because we water down his message, numbing it with platitudes and much more easily digestible snippets? It’s easy to raise his call to love without recognizing that such love is by it’s nature costly and sacrificial. That love, just as Jesus told us, asks us to come and see, and, in this case, to notice how often we take the narrow remembrances of Dr. King’s successes and cast aside the ways that he called us to stay with that vision, to remain dedicated to social change, to abide in our awareness of injustice.

I often wonder, what would Dr. King be doing today? What would he be fighting for today? What would he be protesting? Would he be taking a knee during the national anthem? Would he have called for marriage equality? Would he have been at the front of the protest march shouting, “Black Lives Matter!?” Would he be lending his voice to the victims of police shootings, for medicaid expansion, for undrinkable water in Flint, or a pipeline through Standing Rock? Would he be calling for the ERA to finally be passed in every state, or seeking for money to be taken out of politics, for gerrymandering to cease? Surely he would be appalled at the setbacks in voting rights! And he would still have all of the same things to lament about our economic system, which exploits for the benefit of those at the top, without regard to a living wage or equitable sharing of profit.

“I have a dream,” he once famously said, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Would he still have that dream, only expanded by drawing a circle ever wider, by “staying, remaining, and abiding” with the Love and Spirit given to us in Christ Jesus, the same Love that can open our hearts, expand our circles, ever calling on us to see a liberative God at work all around us?

Oh, friends…there is still much work to do. There is much work to do right here in Tulsa, where we see report after report indicate that our policing has serious racial disparities, something that communities of color don’t need a report to verify, and we’re getting ready to hire a new police chief. Right here our own county jail participates in the injustice machine that is our so-called immigration policy, making political, fear-based statements out of women seeking shelter from violence with their children, and families desperate for a better life. Right now, we see a total failure to adequately fund public education, a demand written in our own state constitution, while tax breaks are given to corporations and millionaires. We close hospitals and isolate families and even entire communities from access to healthcare because we won’t expand Medicaid. Criminal justice, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s healthcare, voting rights…the chances to stay, remain and abide in the lessons given to us by Jesus, Paul and Dr. King are plentiful.

But let us not make the mistake of thinking that our political lives are somehow separate from our faith lives. Let us not take these moments of political crisis as a time to leave our faith, but instead to stay, remain and abide in it. Now please hear me, I did not say anything about our partisan lives, for that is too narrow a definition. Too often we concern ourselves with the puny language of partisanship, looking to promote one party over another, turning politics into a competition, a zero-sum game. We lose out on the moral ground that ought to bolster our political lives and inform the work of politics, which is the method by which we live our morals and ethics into the public sphere, especially in a pluralistic society like ours. So I tell you again, like Jesus said to his disciples and Paul reminded his churches – come and see. Come and see what happens when you take the outrage you might rightly feel and focus it through love. Come and see what occurs when you see injustice and call it out with compassion. Come and see what comes to be when you realize that working to make the world a better place, whether that is feeding a hungry person a meal, writing a letter to the Mayor to express the qualities you seek in a new police chief, or standing together to demand better treatment of immigrants, it is actually participating in the redemptive work that God is doing through Christ Jesus. It IS our faith.

Dr. King’s letter ends like this, written in the vernacular of his time:

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

I think we’re still hoping, Dr. King…still dreaming.

May it come to be.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Acts 10:34-43 & Matthew 3:13-17

I picture it as a typical day, maybe early in the morning, before the heat has set in and people are gathered at the river Jordan. Only they’re not there for any baptism. They are there to wash their clothes or their bodies, to gather water for the stove at home, to give the baby and the grandfather something to drink during the afternoon. Whatever we might say about baptism, and this baptism in particular, it takes place in the same fluidity that marks our everyday life. The waters that wash Jesus and pronounce him “Son of God” are the same waters that will wash the scab on a someone’s arm, and provide a cup of tea, and clean the amniotic fluid and blood off a newborn.

Baptism comes right in the middle of the everyday. This life-changing, transformative, epiphanous event is acknowledged with the same substance that constitutes 60% of our bodies and seventy percent of the earth already. Water in Genesis is both deliverance and destruction, in Exodus it becomes the very presence of God in the desert. Isaiah and Amos use water in their imagery of God’s justice, that it might “flow like a mighty stream,” and all of that Hebrew imagery greatly influences the writers of the Greek texts, this “new” testament in whose words we find the basis for one of our sacraments – it’s like transformation is all around us, celebrated in our scriptures, already in us – baptism is just the ritual where we point it out.

There’s not a lot of compelling evidence that baptism is a big deal in the time of Jesus, except amongst a sect of Judaism that lives out in the desert called the Essenes. It is this sect from which John the Baptist apparently comes to the river seeking to baptize people for the forgiveness of sins. These Essenes seemed to have abandoned Jerusalem, opposing the way that the temple was being run, and established a community at a place called Qumran. They had been around for hundreds of years before Jesus, but something about the reign of the Herods and the Roman authority seems to have pushed Essenic membership way up. They still lived in the desert, far away from the city, and they had a code, a set of disciplines by which they all lived. There was an oath to enter the group, a set of dietary and religious practices, and a dedication to communal living, with all possessions shared with one another…oh, and there was this entry ritual that involved immersion in water…maybe this sounds familiar?

But elsewhere in Judaism, the story of ritual immersion is complicated. The tvilah is the act of immersion in a small pool or bath of water, called a mikva. Immersion in water for ritual purification was traditionally used for restoration to a condition of “ritual purity” in very specific circumstances. Later in Jewish development, immersion is required for any converts to Judaism as part of their conversion, something that is true even today. Immersion in the mikvah represents a change in status in regards to purification, restoration, and qualification for full religious participation in the life of the community.

When John stands in the Jordan, however, it is not for conversion for anyone, nor is it for that specific ritual purity. It is for the forgiveness of sins. Repent, he always cries alongside the call to baptism. Repent, or turn around in Aramaic, like you had forgotten your wallet and returned to your house to get it – turn around and head back to where you came from, as if this baptism is restoring people to something of which they are already a part. Then Jesus shows up and John’s first response is, “What are you coming to me for? I need to be baptized by you.” Now, we can read this as a mark of the “sinlessness” in Jesus, John recognizing the Messiah early on and admitting to his own unworthiness, OR we can also see this as Jesus teaching a whole new framework of power and strength, one that he will model right here, in one of the first public appearances, where he takes a chance to puff himself up, to publicly claim this title and “lord” it over people, pardon the pun. Instead Jesus takes the road of humility and weakness, not asking us to do something that he is not willing to do.

And that brings up another point. Christianity holds baptism in high regard. It is recognized almost universally as a sacrament by the thousands of expressions of the Christian faith across the world. And yet, Jesus never asks any of his followers to be baptized, nor does he ever baptize single person in any of the gospels. Paul, however, and the accounts from Acts, are full of baptism stories, often multiple baptism stories for the same persons. Acts has Paul asking people – into what were you baptized? When they say, “the baptism of John,” he tells them to be baptized into Christ Jesus, as if baptism marks the acceptance of something, even the full arrival of something in us.

One of the earliest Christian documents, The Didache, or “the teaching,” has a whole section on baptism that dispels our idiosyncrasies about the ritual and the “proper” way to baptize, a debate that has probably created most of our denominations themselves. It says baptize in cool, running water…unless you don’t have that. Then use standing water…unless you don’t have that. It wanders through about every example of baptism we use, finally saying that the point is the transformation, not the details of the ritual. So, what does it mean to prioritize a baptism that Jesus never performed, that comes in a zillion different versions, and which clearly wasn’t a “one-time” event, not an act of membership as much as an acceptance of something coming to live in us?

For the disciples, our scriptures tell us, baptism meant a whole lot more than they could now vote at the annual meeting of the congregation. It would completely change their lives and, as we heard from the passage read this morning, would bring about the work of the Holy Spirit on them, pestering, cajoling, almost haunting them with visions of God’s love without exceptions, until such a reminder of Grace caused them to question even their own previously held assumptions, their own cultural and implicit bias. That work of the Holy Spirit happens in our everyday lives, only we likely think of it as something else – a conscience, a desire to be a better person, or our ideological dedications guiding our actions.

“I truly understand,” Peter says to the gathered group of gentiles, “that God shows no partiality, but amongst all people anyone who honors God and works justly is acceptable to God.” This bold statement, made quite in opposition to the social customs and religious practices of his time, is a direct result of whatever it is that we call his baptism…in this case, Peter’s receiving of the Holy Spirit through the ritual of water…

a gift that keeps on giving, taking him to new places, opening his heart again and again to deeper love, stronger faith, more courageous compassion. It is the Spirit, accepted into his heart in a baptism, that keeps working on him. Because baptism, as we discover in the subtext of scripture, is not a single event, but a chronic condition, a transformation that takes the rest of our lives to unfold if we have taken it seriously. For God’s Love is never done with us. It is never finished in it’s task of reshaping our hearts and refining our souls. There’s always a way to draw our circle wider, to expand our understanding, to learn and re-learn and even un-learn as we are exposed again to God’s liberating Love.

The Gospel story from this point on in Matthew’s version will be the unfolding of that identity that Jesus has claimed in the baptism, the manifestation of all of the promises that have come up to this point in Matthew’s telling of the story – the visitation of angels, the promise, the dreams, the birth, the magi, the flight to Egypt, all of it part of who Jesus will be, just as our identity is part of who we will be both before and after our own baptism, found in the very real, daily events of our lives.

As a pastor, I have had the privilege of presiding over many baptisms – the baptisms of infants next to their wide-eyed parents, of children who were old enough to not want any part of the sprinkling, teens who had gone through confirmation and chosen a baptism…even adults, some whom late into their adulthood, who chose baptism as a ritual of personal modification. I have baptized people in swimming pools, and in a lake, and I have watched as my own children were baptized by clergy very close to me. We’ve had one right here, during a sermon on baptism. It was as much a surprise to me as it was, I think, to Jeff, who stepped up when I had the UCC version of an altar call. Each one has been unique, not so much because of the ritual itself, but because of the people involved and what it was that we are up to in this thing we call baptism.

We can talk about baptism as “washing away sin,” I suppose, or as the act that brings us into fellowship with the Christian community, but what happens to Jesus, waist deep in the Jordan with John, what he carried on in his ministry, what the disciples first found themselves claimed by and then set about claiming other with is identity. This is my son, the voice calls out from heaven. And it calls out again with every other baptism –

“This is my child, beloved and accepted.” David Lose reminds us in his commentary on this passage that, “We are at a time and place where so many would like to identify and define us by many, many names: Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, American or foreigner, gay or straight, rich or poor, Black or White, and the list goes on.”

But that’s not who we are. Baptism claims in us an identity as a beloved child of God, which we often say, or sing, as if it is a healing balm. It can certainly be that, especially for those who have been taught that God hates them, or rejects them. Yet it is also a claim on our identity, a way to mark us in the everyday, so that the Spirit residing in us can be heard…so that we might be listening for – even expecting – that voice to whisper to us when the world comes at us with names that wound, or belittle, with names that challenge or limit, the voice reminds us that we have an identity that is more than just mitigating. It is inspirational, it is hopeful, it is powerful.

We ought to note that it is after this dip in the Jordan that Jesus is sent out into the desert to be tested…afterhis baptism that the adversary comes to tempt him with the shallow and shiny…after his identity is given to him that he faces the world knowing who he is –

a beloved child of God, created in and for Love, with malleable hearts that can grow to receive, experience and give more and more love. It’s an identity that allows us to know that God is at work in us, right now, and we are part of something much larger that just ourselves…we have been called into being by nothing less than the same force behind the Big Bang and the cycle of life itself.

As you leave today, I invite you to dip a finger in the water, to remind you of your own baptism…an event that might have taken place in a church, that probably involved water (but maybe not), a moment that you felt the presence of God surrounding you and lifting you up, an event that may have happened only once for you in your whole life, an event that you may struggle to remember, an event that may have happened when you were very young…you may not even remember it at all. That’s OK. It remembers you.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Ephesians 1:3-14 & Matthew 2:1-12

This morning the Gospel comes to us in a familiar tale of Jesus and family post-birth, dealing with the anxieties of their own world. It’s a tale of magi – a word that is a specific reference in the ancient world to Zoroastrian priests, practitioners of astrology and/or astronomy, perhaps, but certainly purveyors of esoteric knowledge. They come to visit Jesus, led by a star, and to pay homage to the “King of the Jews,” which seems to be part of some ancient legend within and beyond Judaism that Matthew employs for his gospel. By telling the story this way, Matthew allows us to read that our heads and our hearts are part of the Jesus story – that the science of astronomy and the faith of spirituality need not be polarized things at all. Matthew allows us to see the global impact of Christ through the Magi, their awareness of nature and the Holy giving us insight into how we might better see our own world today, and pay attention to the signs it is giving us now. And Matthew also allows us again to see God’s action in things that would be labeled “queer,” as these foreign visitors with strange insights and sensibilities are in this story. God specializes in the queer, and I say and use that word intentionally, knowing that there is a lesson in that for the Church right now as well.

The other passage is an introduction to a letter by Paul to the church in Ephesus – not the content of the letter, mind you, but just the greeting. And, most scholars agree, this isn’t even a letter from Paul, it’s one written much later in his name with some different language than he used, and even some different theology. But my point isn’t the language or the theology. It is that this author, following in the model that Paul set in his own letters, thought it was important, before tackling the problems that this church was having, to remind everyone of the basics – “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.” They may not be basics that I would affirm, or language that I would use, but it is a reminder that when faced with problems and turmoil, it’s wise to remind ourselves of the basics, the foundations on which we live.

Following Jesus begins with this night – a celebration that really begins tomorrow, at the end of the 12 days of Christmas – yes, it’s still Christmas – in a day we call Epiphany. It’s not an altogether pleasant story. It is full of struggle, violence, and pain…the plight of the innocent and and the abuse of power, an all-too familiar refrain. In the sentences after we stopped, Herod will go on his murderous rampage, causing the Magi to flee home via another road and the Holy Family to become refugees in Egypt, seeking shelter in a home that is not theirs, fleeing danger and oppression as an act of desperation, as another part of this Epiphany story that ought to shape our hearts right now. When we sentimentalize this scripture, we lose all of it’s power to transform us, just as when we forget the basics, we begin to think that church is a club, that faith is a transaction, that our baptism is about joining something instead of transforming our hearts…then we can much more easily forget the incredible, incriminating, illuminating power that comes when we say that Jesus is Lord…because it means that Caesar, or the Emperor, or the King, or the President, is NOT. The glory of the Magi and the Epiphany story comes in knowing that there is another message – a message of warning to those who are trying to stop the flow of God’s gracious and liberating work in the world; you can do whatever you want, pull any strings you want, commit any atrocity you want, but you will not win. Love wins.

That’s a message that both inspires and indicts us even today – 2000 and 20 years later. It’s a message that comes after the “yes.” As Mary and Joseph, like all parents, realize slowly that this baby will take everything they have. The kid cries all the time. Mary still feels beat up, breastfeeding’s harder to figure out than she expected, and there’s so much laundry….so much laundry. And oh, lord, if only those long nights were silent. All of this is tempered with the slow realization that it’s only going to get harder. Yet somehow the smile on that baby’s face inspires parents of all kinds to keep going, even as the mistakes we inevitably make indict us on our own incapacity to live or learn or love perfectly.

Our reminder this morning – our basics – come in the form of a baby, whose fragility reminds us that our power is found in vulnerability, whose birthplace reminds us that God is the God of the downtrodden and exposed, whose initial worshippers remind us that God is the God of the queer, and the left-out and those on the margins. It will soon be his love that reminds us how we are meant to be in the world…love that prays not only for neighbors, but also for enemies…love that cares for the sick and the prisoner…love that supplants judgment and lives instead by grace and forgiveness.

These are the basics – to be love in the world, and to make peace and seek joy wherever we can. It’s the most simple and most complicated thing to do, equal parts possible and impossible, both inspiring and indicting, for truly living our lives rooted in love as our guiding principle would mean changing everything – social structures, educational systems, our politics, our economics, the very foundations of everything around us.

And if that’s right, then in order for the systems we use to govern ourselves and each other to be loving…they have to be just. And if they are not, we must be courageous and willing enough to change them.

My “for instance” starts right here in the sanctuary where you may (or may not) have noticed that we have changed the paraments – the fabric that adorns the pulpit and lectern and communion table. They were advent blue for awhile, and what we’re supposed to change them to for Epiphany is white, a color reserved for the holiest days, for the holidays that are most “pure.” Now maybe you don’t even think about that, but I’ll ask us to go back to our foundations, and our claims against racism and discrimination. Do we need to ask ourselves why white and purity have been so long associated? And is that the message that we wish to send in 2020, that “white” equals holy, or the “best?” My answer is no, and, for my part, I’ll no longer participate in that characterization, because symbolism matters, which is why the paraments are red today as we discuss a different color to use for our holiest days.

That’s just a small way of asking a question that is more provocative than ever – what does it mean to be a Christian? So many of us have dealt with being “Christian buts’ – I’m a Christian BUT, I don’t believe in that way, because what it means to be Christian has been defined in ways that we’re uncomfortable with at best. Our foundations lie in some different choices, some questions we ought to consider.

• Do you think the point of being Christian, the major issues that one ought to be concerned with are LGBTQ people and controlling women’s reproductive choices, or do you think that poverty and oppression are bigger agenda items for a Christian life?
• Are we to be pro-war, heading off to various parts of the world “with God on our side,” waving our flag as if it were holiness itself, or are we to be peacemakers, seeing war as a failure, dedicating our allegiance not to shallow patriotism but to the depth and sacrifice it takes to follow the Prince of Peace?
• Are we to nurture and make decisions from our fear, or are we to resist the fear present in us all – fear of “the other,” fear of difference, fear of change?
• Are we to consume any and all resources there are because God made them for us, or to be the stewards of this great gift of planet earth?
• Are we to use the Bible as a hammer to smash other people with, or use it most sharply as a tool for our own self-illumination?
• Are we to mistrust those whose skin color is different from our own, whose life seems lived in ways contrary to the way we live ours, or are we to seek God’s presence in diversity, rooting out the evils of racism, sexism and bigotry of all kinds that has so plagued us and the systems we have built?
• Finally, can we see today that the most stark example of what it means to be Christian, the most clear illustration of the choice we might make, the “type” of Christian we will be, is found in how we would seek to respond to people seeking refuge on our border…it is found in what we would do to a child in desperate need, particularly at the time of year we proclaim the birth of the child we claim to worship, born poor and oppressed to a woman with some atypical reproductive choices, at a time of war, seeking refuge with his family, fleeing tyranny and the abuse of power.

This is the Sunday of Epiphany – a word that means the perception of essential meaning. What a good time God has set for us to take stock, to open our eyes, to have that light go off over our heads and to find great clarity of vision. A time to re-assess and count our blessings, for there are many. And then a time to resolve for the year to come that we are indeed Christians – little Christs – and we will act accordingly.

May God’s Grace and Love guide us all.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Isaiah 7:10-16 & Matthew 1:18-25

Public disclaimer time: Isaiah is not talking about Jesus, the so-called “Old Testament” is not predictive of, nor replaced by the “New Testament” and Christianity is not the fulfillment of Judaism. It seems important on the last Sunday of Advent, and as the evening marks the beginning of Hanukkah, to say those things. And saying them might remind us that these two great religions are actually in conversation with one another, like deeply connected cousins, marked by the reality that our holidays often correspond, and our Christian sacraments – baptism and communion – have deep connections to the Jewish rituals of Kiddush, the blessing of the wine after worship, and Mikva, the ritual immersion that is still part of a Jewish conversion ceremony.

It’s important to note these things at this time because Christmas is one of those moments where our scriptures get intertwined, and where the tradition has blurred these lines and asserted this position of Christian dominance, and such language leads to horrible ends, as witnessed by history many, many times. So, at the birth of the Prince of Peace, as well as this moment in our nation’s history, it seems a good time to ask us all to consider what makes for peace. And it begins with how we talk about each other, and to consider, as we wrestle with our divisions, the ways that we are also connected. For we all have our stories, our stories of power and meaning-making, that shape who we are – sometimes the same story shaping people in different ways.

I have found, through years of interfaith dialogue, that the wisdom and Spirit of God is found in the conversations between perspectives, for all of our spiritual wisdom stories are more than just one thing…they are many things, all revealing an aspect of the God who is bigger than all our imaginations, and greater than all our possibilities. We get to talk about and imagine the infinite, but only through the languages and lenses of the finite. As human beings, we get a lifetime of finite stories – instances of peace, of war, of loss, of success, of failure and tragedy, joy and happiness, profound mistakes and intimate connections – a collection of finite circumstances that fit into an infinite narrative. We only have the ability to perceive (and occasionally understand) the finite…God works in the realm of the infinite.

Isaiah’s proclamation is not an infinite one, though it is part of an infinite story. It is finite. The Hebrew used in this passage is clear that Isaiah is speaking about his time, his place. When he says, “Look, the young woman is with child…”, it is a declarative statement, like, “Look, over there, at this young woman I am pointing towards.” He does not mean it to be an infinite declaration about Jesus, but a finite declaration about someone in his time and his place, a statement that declares a sign from God that will bring about some peace they are hoping for in their context…a finite peace that has to do with the fear of invasion being negated in the short timeframe of a child’s early development.

And yet, as so often happens, that finite declaration becomes tied to a more infinite story, for we all end up longing for peace in our own time – peace as in the absence of war, but also peace in our own relationships, in our vocations, our community, our own lives. And when the writers of our Christmas story longed for that same peace, they heard those words of Isaiah an re-interpreted them. This time of year in our tradition we celebrate the birth of the “Prince of Peace” because that’s what we say Jesus brings –peace as salvation, the kind of salvation that the angel tells Joseph Jesus will bring, the kind of peace that Isaiah lifted up also. And that peace at Christmas begins with a “yes” from these soon-to-be parents, Mary and Joseph.

I have to confess, as a parent, that these birth narratives from Matthew and Luke both inspire and terrify me. Parenting can be, on it’s best days, a white-knuckle ride of debate about nature versus nurture, second-guessing your decisions and hoping that your own fears are not limiting your kids’ futures. Then add to that mix an angel who tells you magnificent things about what your kid will do and you have what I imagine would be a LOT of sleepless nights, a constant conflict between the finite world of raising kids and the infinite world of human possibility. Might Mary and Joseph have reminded each other of this promise of Jesus’ greatness after Jesus broke another water pitcher running through the house, or hit his brother with a rock, or when he missed his curfew again?

We all trust in a future hoped for, but not yet seen. And we are often limited by t=our own fear, trapped in what we think is likely, unable to imagine what is possible.

The beauty of the Christmas story is that when faced with the prospect of the impossible…the choice between assuming the outcome that they’ve seen play out a hundred times and trusting in the possibility that the movement of God in the world can make the unlikely happen, both Mary and Joseph – inexplicably – choose to trust. They choose yes. It is the same yes that their son will choose, when faced with the option to love without exceptions or do what everyone else does – he loves, even to the point of facing the power of his day with that love.

Of course, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It’s still only Advent in our calendars…we are not even at the birth yet, in our grand re-telling of this Christmas tale. There’s still so much of the story left to unfold. We are at the promise. And in the great drama of the church, we are to imagine that we are being asked to birth the Christ child, to parent that baby, to expose ourselves to risk, to challenge, even to scorn. This is now only the possibility of peace, in one way of looking at it, if the participants will have it. And it begins with yes.

Mary’s yes is to a plan from the visiting angel Gabriel, presumably the only heavenly being she has ever witnessed, telling her, an engaged but not yet married young woman, that she was going to have a child and name him Jesus, and he will be given the throne of David and will reign over the House of Jacob not just for his lifetime, but forever –

a statement, in the face of Roman oppression, that seems absurd. It is, quite frankly, an impossible scenario. She knows what will happen if she shows up pregnant right now, her parents will kill her. By Biblical standards – and this is real, you can look it up – they could literally kill her. And then this whole thing of her kid, a boy born out of wedlock to a poor couple in the country becoming King? Ludicrous.

And Joseph’s yes comes to him in the first of a series of dreams that will visit him, telling him of a future in imagery, in partial descriptions, in fanciful promises that he will place his trust in because…well, we don’t know why? I suspect that people around him in his day and age questioned his decisions, maybe even called him foolish for this behavior. For what he was talking about was impossible.

But Christmas is all about the impossible. We wouldn’t be re-telling this story 2000 years later if it was onlya tale of something totally mundane. We keep telling it because it is the story of God acting in the mundane – of God known to us in flesh and bone.

We celebrate this birth with pomp and circumstance, rarely bringing up Mary’s contractions, or what might have been hard labor in difficult circumstances. We talk about visiting shepherds and cattle that are self-aware enough to bow their heads, not of the blood and sweat and tears and the struggle that goes along with all births. We sing “Away in a Manger,” where the little baby Jesus “no crying he makes,” which certainly could have happened, though, like many parents, I have some serious doubts about the solemnity of that moment. The laying down of his sweet head part surely comes after the less mentioned screaming his head off part…or the biting during nursing part…or the gassy kid who spits up all over Mary’s new shawl. And yet, that is also where the majesty and glory of God show up…a message we also need to hear at Christmas, where “yes” brings new life right here, among and in our own bodies, deeply connected to this world of struggle and conflict and compromise.

Our finitude is connected deeply to infinity, our flesh linked to Spirit. This truth lies at the heart of the Christmas story. God does not live in purity and isolation, but resides with us here in the dirt, knowing our pain, knowing our effort, knowing our strength and our weakness. This birth shows us that God will not only show up in the most visceral moments of our lives, but will show up precisely in the places we don’t ever expect God to be, asking for a yes to God’s plan to connect to all of us, to save all of us, to bring Hope and Joy and Peace and Love to all of us. Such a yes will ask us to face our own prejudices, and to reimagine God, for, if we’re paying attention, God will take form exactly where we think we can’t go and ask us to go there.

The first part of Christmas, you see, before the birth and the “Joy to the World” and the presents and the meal…the first part is the yes. Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s perspective, Luke from Mary’s…and that story now resides in us, to be told from our perspective, asking us to consider our own yes even in the most mundane parts of our own lives. Will we say yes this year to God born in and among us, right in the middle of our lives, ready, willing and able to transform that which we think is hopeless? Will we say yes by helping that one person in a finite way, while we reach for the infinite? Will we say yes by speaking words of kindness just once, knowing that’s part of something much bigger? Will we say yes by speaking out on behalf of one person who is bearing the weight of oppression, though that will not end the oppression? Will we, finally, listen for the voice of angels, bringing the message of Love making a way out of no way, asking us to marry ourselves to God’s plan of drawing our circle ever wider, doing justice, loving kindness and walking with God in humility? Will we hear that choir of angels telling us, again this Christmas…do not be afraid?

In this blessed time of Advent, almost to Christmas, with four candles lighting our way, may you feel held in the circle of God’s love. Rest there and find your way to yes.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Isaiah 35:1-10 & Luke 1:39-56

Every year, at Advent, this passage from Luke comes up, often next to a passage from Isaiah also dreaming of an age to come where things are very different. It’s one of the few passages that gets exposure every single year in the lectionary, almost as if the organizers of the collection of scriptures that guide many worship services across the world wanted to be sure that it was heard. There are countless commentaries on Mary’s words here from Luke’s gospel, and they almost all use one word to describe these 17 lines — revolutionary.

Now I’m not sure if you’re feeling revolutionary right now. Maybe you are. There’s plenty of reason to feel that way – a trip to the mall this time of year, for instance, brings up feelings of armed insurrection for many of us. And then there’s also the state of our nation, our state, our city – the world, even. But what I mean is this season in the church, this pre-Christmas Advent. Does Advent seem revolutionary to you? Does this time of year scream economic justice to you, or turning the world upside down, or revolution? Or does this lead-up to Christmas feel like more like a time to settle into traditions, go with the flow and get the list checked-off so that the events can happen…just like last year and the year before that, etc.? It’s hard to overemphasize how oddly this passage rings in our ears, a passage decrying the presence of economic injustice while we are assaulted with messages of consumption driven by an economy that we know doesn’t work for everyone at all, with decisions being made by the 1% for the 1%, in the midst of an election cycle in which the influence of money is no longer even being hidden at all – the more money you have, the better chance you’ve got. You have to have enough of it to qualify for a debate!

The suffering is all around us, and the numbers really don’t look all that good, unless you’re privileged enough to have a 401K. The signs of hate and division, conflict and war…they’re all over the place. The same things that Mary decries in this passage from 2000 years ago reside with us still. It doesn’t seem like revolution is impending, or that the presence of God is anywhere near.

Yet the whole theme of Advent is the intrusion of God into our world, the development of patience in an impatient world, the reality of God-with-us as an enfleshed reality…something that is real and tangible, not just a hoped for dream. Yet it comes to us in a baby…born in a manger somewhere where there are no cameras, where there’s not even cell coverage…born in the quiet of the back corners. This is a very hard story to tell in a church that is more often focused on triumphalism and the celebration, rather than incarnation or revolution.

The Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr tells us that the wisdom of the church is taking huge, cosmic, infinite mysteries like the second coming of Christ and distilling it into finite, calendered periods of time, like Advent…which announces again the coming of Jesus…the second coming which hasn’t yet happened and is always happening. It asks us every year to consider what our own blockages are to that arrival, what our resistance is to the revolution that Mary announces…a Mary who herself has to wrestle with her own commitment to this whole Jesus thing, an angel announcing to her that God’s work is to be done through her. She says yes to this…what do we say, for the angel has the same announcement for each of us, in that infinite sense…God is born, God is enfleshed in each of us all of the time. Are we willing to look for that?

Which begs another question – is God really ignoring what’s happening in the world, or are we just looking in the wrong places for God’s action?

Mary’s words have been formed over the centuries into a song, a canticle, one of the most ancient of Christian hymns – what we call the “Magnificat.” It is not a fanciful dream of lions and lambs, but a poignant and direct response to the times in which Mary lives. Mary takes the metaphorical language of Isaiah and makes it concrete, speaking of the powerful brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with good things and the rich sent away empty – it is a reversal of the reality in which she lives. This is Mary taking the blessing given directly to her by the angel and spreading it out, switching from “the Lord has done great things for me” to broader language about God’s saving power released upon the whole community – a shift from her suffering to compassion for others. She takes her blessing and shares it in a vision of God’s saving power poured out on the world, wrapped in the language of Joy.

There’s a perhaps legendary account that claims the military junta in 1980s Guatemala banned the public recitation of Mary’s words. I’m not sure there’s evidence to back this up, but if it did happen, it would have indicated that the political bosses understood what she was saying, perhaps more than many of us who hear or sing these words each year, for the implications of this kind of radical joy, this revolution of compassion are immense and perhaps even frightening.

Mary imagines a reversal, some justice that kind of looks like payback for those who have exploited others for so long, and Jesus, her son who surely heard these same revelations from his mother’s mouth, takes them a step further. He delivers not just an inversion of the pyramid, where the ones on the bottom get to be on the top, for we all know what happens when that is the extent of justice – the downtrodden become the downtrodders, the exploited exploit. No, Jesus delivers a kin-dom founded on mercy, on justice delivered through love, of accountability and responsibility shaped through the lens of grace. Jesus asks us to not simply seek revenge, as tempting as that can be, but to look into our hearts so that we’re not simply replicating the very thing that we work against…he delivers to us a revolution in our own hearts, and then into the world…he hands to us a re-visioning tool, a reframing, revolutionary approach, and he calls this – Joy.

Jesus is not handing out happiness. He is not offering us “feel good”, nor is he offering us some new packaging for our current ideals. Joy is counter-cultural, it is revolutionary in and of itself, particularly for us here in our context. Sister Simone, of the famous traveling, havoc-wreaking, trouble-making Nuns on a Bus, says that Joy is one of the virtues that we must recover in our time and place, as a revolutionary act, because joy is a communal virtue. You can’t go off by yourself, wallowing in your individualism, and create joy. Joy comes from connection, which is precisely what community craves, what democracy craves, and what the Kin-dom is all about. Joy is the antidote for the fear and aggression that is produced by individualism – the idea that we’re all ultimately on our own, with only ourselves and, typically, our trusty six-shooter to save us. That’s the ideology that pushes us behind locked gates, that builds walls, that punishes instead of rehabilitating, that divides and hoards and hates and stacks-the-decks so that the illusion of control is maintained at all costs. We’re seeing it lived out to what feels like the fullest extent right now. And what stands in contrast to that is Joy.

That’s not always a ready commodity at the so-called “most wonderful time of the year.” We have a “Blue Christmas” service this coming Wednesday night because I know that many would say they’re not feeling any joy at all. This is why during this time of the church calendar we lift up the birth of Jesus, a time that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the actual birth of Jesus, mind you – we don’t really know when that was. But this is the time that we remind ourselves of this story of hope and joy – in the deep, darkness of winter, in the cold and the gloom, in what used to be (before the invention of electricity) an even more difficult time to navigate. Now is when we emphasize the community, the connection, the Kin-dom, the linkages that make for Joy. Now is when we make these outlandish claims about the great reversal of injustices, the Kin-dom come to fruition, the Christ – the power of God incarnate — born to us in a tiny, fragile, helpless baby.

Joy comes to us as a great mystery. Like laughing at a funeral or crying your way through the happiest moment of your life, Joy doesn’t make sense. It comes when it’s not supposed to and lingers when you think that something else should be occupying the space. Why, one might ask this year, with all of the crud going on around us, should we feel joyful? Well, I don’t know if we should, I just know that we can, for the gift of Christmas is choice. God doesn’t operate on coercion or force, despite what some might have you think. God works on consent – we , like Mary, must choose to participate in the Kin-dom come, so the pronouncement of the now 300 year-old song is true – Joy to the World, the Lord is come – but only if you choose it. For joy does not just happen, we have to choose it, to look for it, to reframe the world around us so that we can connect to it.

Mary chooses to see the angel’s vision, to accept the words meant for her, which I assure you was quite in conflict with the other voices around her. She chooses to frame her situation, her life, her world, through the pronouncement of Christmas Joy. In one way of looking at it, the Christmas story is just the rather problematic story of a child born out of wedlock, against all the social rules, to what is likely now an ostracized couple in abject poverty in the backwoods of the Roman Empire as the imperially supported King in Jerusalem places an order for all male children to be slaughtered. It’s not a happy tale. So, why are we celebrating? Because we have reframed this story. We have reimagined it in light of the Easter story that we know is coming. We have imagined it as the beginning of God’s direct intervention in the world, God-made-flesh, living with us and for us and in us. We choose the re-frame it each and every year, which is why we tell this story and sing these carols, and light these candles. Because reframing is the work of Joy. It is the essence of Joy, the imagination of Joy, the power of Joy…joy as the infallible sign of God’s presence among us, the echo of God’s life within us, joy that lets us sing, as an act of holy reframing –

My heart shall sing of the day you bring, let the fires of your justice burn…

wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.

Joy to the world. The Lord is come.